The welfare state has transformed into a policing state of flows.

Evidence

Civil society both fuels and is underpinned by a state. But the state form, its principal modality, has transformed from one earlier conceived as caretaker of the population’s welfare, its pastoral prescriptive (to use Zygmunt Bauman’s term) enacted through modalities of constraining, confining, and containing the undesirable, to that of traffic cop. The traffic cop state polices flows human, capital, and commodity, regulating the political, cultural, and economic. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 211

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘traffic cop state’ as a distinct concept: the state as regulator of flows rather than caretaker of welfare.
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely reorienting frame — the state’s core function reframed from welfare-caretaker to flow-policer, with the pastoral metaphor borrowed from Bauman and inverted.
• SEED: Essay angle: the traffic cop state as a way to read contemporary immigration, trade, and data-policy battles as one phenomenon.
• XREF: connects to: The state now sorts citizens into lauded risk-takers and abject at-risk populations — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 266; The state’s core function shifted from enclosing citizens to regulating flows. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1804; Neoliberal states shifted from citizen wellbeing to policing and surveillance — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 203